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lemissingmask · 6 months

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[ID: Sketch of Jacob Stone bursting into flames, with his exposed arm and hand on fire already and sparks around him, and an expression of pain on his face. End ID]

Day 26: Curse

vampire!Stone dealing with the curse of vampirism and bursting into flame when someone accidentally opens the back door and lets in daylight.

Ficlet (to be honest it got carried away and I don’t think it’s in ficlet territory anymore) below the cut. This carries on almost directly from Dehumanization prompt fill.

There’s one more loose end I need to wrap up for this vampire!Stone series

It was a trick. It was another of the vampire’s sick games. Or his mind was messing with him. It had moved on from hopeful hallucinations to nightmares.

Jake wasn’t here.

He wasn’t in the annex, and he wasn’t looking at the empty space where he should have been in a mirror he knew so well. A mirror he knew worked and he knew he should be able to see himself in because he had so many times before.

Jake couldn’t be here.

He was still in that dark, cold cell, waiting for the vampires to come back and feed on him again. Any moment this nightmare would fade to reality and he would see his own blood on the floor beneath him, a ghost of his reflection in it.

This nightmare just needed to stop soon.

It really needed to stop, and Eve needed to stop feeling so real and solid behind him, holding him up when he knew it was only those chains holding him up. They were his only support and he needed to wake up and return to them and end this.

But he wasn’t.

Jake wasn’t waking up, and Eve was still behind him, Cassie still in front of him, Ezekiel behind her.

They were talking but he didn’t hear.

He had to wake up.

He tried to pull away from them. To escape this lie.

He fell, but he never felt his body hit the floor, and not from the chains. Eve was still there and she had caught him and the nightmare wouldn’t end.

Jake tried to get away.

If he could get back through the back door…maybe that would wake him up. Maybe that would bring him back to the familiar cell and the feedings, and vampires didn’t feed on other vampires.

But he couldn’t get free.

There was Jenkins too, holding him steady, and now he knew this had to be a trick from the vampire because there was a sudden sharp pain in his arm, like a bite. Not much pain, but it was there and it was sharp. It had to be a fang, so he knew it was a lie.

He was still in that prison.

Jake was still human.

Eve had been standing behind Stone, already supporting most of his weight, so it took almost no adjustment to catch him when his legs suddenly gave way.

She had been prepared for it.

She had not been prepared for the tears she saw rolling down his cheeks, cutting paths through the blood spattered over his skin, nor for him to weakly try and get free of her arms.

And she had definitely not been prepared for Jenkins to kneel on his other side and suddenly inject him with something that looked unsettlingly like the sedative they had used on the saw-toothed moth when it had gotten loose a few months ago.

“What the hell Jenkins?!” Ezekiel yelled, “He hasn’t had enough stabby already?!”

“It’s just a sedative,” Jenkins replied not quite with his usual calm, “It should keep him out for a few hours.”

Eve nodded shakily, “That’s good. He was panicking and making his injuries worse. This way we can keep him alive until we get him to a hospital.”

“We can’t take him to a hospital,” Flynn said solemnly.

He was the only one standing away from the group, watching them, his expression as grave as Eve had ever seen it.

“Why not?!” Cassandra had caught one of Stone’s hands with her own, “We tell them it was an animal attack or something…use a spell to…”

“We can’t take him to a hospital!” Flynn snapped back, suddenly in motion. He grabbed Judson’s mirror and set it down beside them, tilted so they could see Stone’s reflection in it.

Or, where Stone’s reflection should have been.

“We can’t take him to a hospital,” Flynn repeated more gently, “Because he’s a vampire.”

“No,” Eve breathed, shaking her head, “H-he’s not…”

“He is,” Flynn let the mirror lay flat, crouching and looking back at Stone.

“Well we gotta do something!” Ezekiel looked desperately from Flynn to Jenkins, who only shook his head.

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“You stopped me from becoming a werewolf!”

“Lycanthropy does not require the afflicted to die!” Jenkins snapped back, then managed to master himself, and added solemnly, “Mr Stone has already died in order to get this far into the transformation. It cannot be reversed now.”

Cassandra whispered a heartbreaking, trembling, “He died there?” that was drowned out my Ezekiel’s voice, desperate and angry.

“We have the entire library! We can’t just give up! There has to be something we can do!”

“There is,” Eve wiped the tears that kept brimming in her eyes, “We support him. We help him through whatever comes next and we make sure he knows this is still his home. He’s still a librarian.”

“Eve’s right,” Flynn said, “We can’t stop this but we can still help.”

“What about the sanctuary? Estelle might be able to help…”

“No! He belongs here!” Ezekiel bit his lip, “Besides he doesn’t trust easily. We’re the only ones he does trust.”

“So we get him to his room,” Eve said, “We patch him up, do what we can, and prepare for…for whatever comes next.”

“Cassandra,” Flynn moved in position to help Eve carry Stone again, “Look into spells that can be used to keep a vampire contained without harming them.”

“We’re gonna lock him up?!”

“We’re going to contain him until the initial inevitable blood lust passes and he has control of it, and speaking of which, Jones, you need to go steal some blood.”

“Steal some blood?! Seriously?! We’re just gonna let this happen and…” Ezekiel cut himself off, or maybe just couldn’t figure out the words to say.

“Yes, from a blood bank. Look for AB blood types. He’s going to need blood to recover, and to stave off the cravings. It’s like a…”

“So we have a plan,” Eve interrupted what she could see what an impending ramble, “Cassandra, spells to safely contain vampires. Jones, rob a blood bank. Flynn, Jenkins, with me.”

Direct, clear action was good. That’s what they needed. They needed things to do so they didn’t have to think. Think about the fact that Stone had died in that dark, cold, dirty cell, alone but for his tormentors. The vampires who had done this to him.

The sedative Jenkins had given him seemed to be working. Either that or he was still human enough to be completely struck down by the severe injuries and extreme blood loss.

The transformation hadn’t gone far, according to Jenkins. He had only just been turned, which meant if they had got to him just a bit sooner…

Stone didn’t move, didn’t stir at all, as they removed his clothes and cleaned the dirt and blood from his skin.

In doing so, they revealed wounds horribly deep and ragged and layered - bite upon bite and flesh torn deeply into, cloth from his shirt and jeans caught inside, in some places on his wrists bone visible…

But, there were signs of some already starting to heal, his body knitting itself back together, and the only wound that hadn’t even started that yet was on the right side of his neck. That must be where he was fed on most recently.

That had to have been the one that finally killed him, drained what was left of his life away in that dark, cold, squalid cell, while he was chained to the wall, unable to defend himself or do anything to stop it.

Eve was furious. It wasn’t right and he wasn’t fair, and they should have been able to save him in time. That was their job. To save people from threats like this, and they couldn’t save one of their own.

She had killed two vampires in that place. She wished there had been more so she could have taken them out too. Got some sort of revenge.

Not that it would help. It was too late now.

Without an outlet for her rage, Eve fell to despair, and her eyes brimmed with tears again.

Being turned into a vampire aside, what Stone had been through was horrific. Traumatic was an understatement, and he had suffered all that alone while they failed to find him day after day.

Other than Jenkins giving instructions on helping him with bandaging and cleaning, none of them spoke. Eve doubted she could have even if she tried, not without it coming out as a sob.

When finally it was done and they had him cleaned, bandaged, and dressed in his favourite flannel lounge pants with van Gogh’s sunflowers embroidered crudely on - a gift from Cassandra when she got herself a sewing machine - he might almost have looked normal.

Like he was sleeping after a rough mission, and the bandages hid normal injuries, not the bites from multiple vampires and the one bite that killed him.

“How is he?” Cassandra poked her head in through the doorway, grimacing as she glanced to the adjoining bathroom, now decorated with his blood from their haphazard medical treatment.

“Still out,” Eve replied, looking from the door and back to Stone, “But we’ve done what we can for now.”

There was a pause. Silence.

Ezekiel cleared his throat before speaking, his voice cracking on the first attempt before he managed to get it under control, “Well, I stole from a few blood banks. Ones well stocked, so they shouldn’t miss a few packs. Left it all in a cooler in the annex.”

“And I found a spell that should keep him in here, if that’s what we really think is best,” Cassandra continued, “Just need to paint a few sigils around his door and infuse them with an incantation. It’ll be like a window. He can’t pass it but it won’t hurt him.”

“Okay, good. Do that,” Eve said, “And when he wakes up, we give him…we see if he wants…”

“We give him one of the blood bags,” Flynn finished for her, “Which he will need.”

“We do it two of us at a time. One with a sedative on hand in case he becomes violent.”

“But it’s still Stone,” Cassandra argued, “He wouldn’t hurt us, and treating him like…”

“Like a monster,” Ezekiel finished when she broke off, “That’s not gonna help.”

“Do you imagine he would ever forgive himself were he to harm one of us?” Jenkins argued, “He will not be entirely himself. Not until he has mastered this. Colonel Baird is right. We need to be prepared for the possibility of his growing violent.”

Jenkins’ warning made sense, but at first Stone didn’t grow violent at all.

He wasn’t even really lucid for the first few days, but he wasn’t really their Jacob Stone either.

He drank when they brought him some blood. Always barely awake and only a few small sips at first, but then he lifted himself up a bit, grabbed to hold the bag and drink faster. Desperately.

On the sixth day, he grabbed Flynn’s wrist and tried to drag it to him, but he wasn’t strong enough to maintain his grip. They realised later that Flynn had a paper cut, a tiny slice, not too deep, but that had to be what Stone had wanted.

On the seventh day, he was sitting up in the bed when Eve arrived, leaning back against the wall and picking at the bandage on his left wrist with a right hand that looked to be bleeding.

Eve stopped outside the door, watching for a moment.

“This real?”

His voice startled her. It was rough and quiet, but it was the first coherent sound he’d made since they got him back, and she wasn’t prepared for the wave of mixed emotions when she heard it.

“It’s real,” she replied, stepping into the room with Ezekiel half a step behind her. She paused when she caught sight of the shattered mirror in the bathroom, and now his bloody right hand made sense.

She made a mental note that someone needed to clean that up later. Maybe make sure there were no mirrors in the room at all.

Stone’s head raised as she drew closer, eyes taking on that alert sharpness that she had grown used to each time he caught the scent of the blood they brought.

“How’re you feeling?” she asked, but he wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on the bag she held in her hand.

“Stone?”

No reply, and a tensing of muscles like he was about to move.

She quickly back stepped, shoving Ezekiel back through the door and practically falling out of it himself when he launched himself from the bed after her, stopping abruptly at the door.

He fell back against the desk behind him, gripping it tightly and looking as exhausted as before, the brief moment of energy gone.

But his voice was still almost strong as he growled, “Give it to me.”

“Calm down first,” Eve forced her voice to remain calm and unaffected by the sight of her friend so painfully not himself, “Get back into bed. You’re still too injured to be up.”

There was a low growl that sounded utterly inhuman, and Stone continued to glare coldly at her.

It hurt. It hurt unbearably, but she knew what she had to do.

She just couldn’t.

“Haven’t I suffered enough?!” Stone yelled, “I need that!”

“Not til you calm down you don’t,” Ezekiel shouted back.

“We’re trying to help you,” Eve said more gently.

“Help me?” Stone laughed bitterly, “You’re tryin’ to help me? You coulda done that by leavin’ me there! You think they’d have tortured me like this?!”

The vampires had tortured him for almost two weeks. She wouldn’t put it past them.

“We’re here to help our friend, not the vampire! And until we see our Jake Stone again, we’re not giving you anything.”

Ezekiel grabbed the blood bag from Eve and turned, storming away.

“Baird,” Stone pushed himself off the desk and fell against the blank space of his doorway, “Eve. Please.”

“Ezekiel’s right,” she replied softly, stepping closer, “All the things we found suggest it’ll be easier for you to control this early on then trying to do it later. And…”

“Go away,” Stone growled, glaring up at her, “If you ain’t gonna help then leave me the hell alone!”

The shouted words cut right through every wall she had managed to build up.

Jacob Stone didn’t shout. Almost never. Maybe in a heated debate about art or architecture, but rarely even then. He spoke softly, chose his words carefully.

And this creature in front of her wasn’t the same person.

Swallowing down the lump in her throat, Eve turned and walked away.

“He’s like an addict,” Ezekiel was saying when she reached the annex, “He’s not acting like himself now, but he’s gotta still be in there.”

“The blood lust is making him act on pure instinct,” Flynn nodded, “But we have all seen vampires who have control over that.”

“We know it can be controlled,” Cassandra nodded, “And Stone had the self-control to hide his passions and who he really was from everyone he knew for like two decades. If anyone can do it, he can.”

Jenkins hummed thoughtfully and went to retrieve a book, “And perhaps that passion is how we help get through to Mr Stone…this is the book he was reading before he was taken. He spoke of a paper he was considering based on some arguments made by its author on art as a reaction to imposition by…”

He waved a hand.

“Anyway, the point is, if we can trigger the man we know using his love for art and literature, we may be able to better help him master his condition.”

“We should give him a while to calm down first. He looked ready to kill.”

Cassandra slapped Ezekiel’s shoulder, “He wouldn’t kill us.”

The thief shook his head, “Shoulda seen the look in his eyes.”

“Ezekiel’s right. Jenkins and I will try in a few hours.”

It did work.

It took some time, but before Eve went to bring the blood, Jenkins put a chair outside the door and discussed the contents of that book with Stone, a conversation that gradually began to really sound like him again. When she brought the blood, he was enough himself to be repulsed at first by the idea, and only show that feral expression for a few minutes while he drank, and briefly after it was empty.

After that, whoever brought him his small portion of blood on a given day went armed with something that might get through to the man they knew.

A quote, a book, or maybe a photo of a newly discovered piece of art or architecture, and little by little, their Jake emerged from the feral vampire, and not once did they have to sedate him.

It took almost three months to feel like it really was their friend again, during which everyone else necessarily kept up with the library’s work. Three at a time, either Eve or Flynn taking Stone’s place, and always at least two in the library to make sure Stone continued to improve.

But he did and if it wasn’t for him being locked in one room, or for the fact he preferred drinking blood to beer, Eve might have been able to convince herself nothing had changed.

“We’re thinking of removing the sigils,” Cassandra said one morning as she and Eve sat in the room with Stone while he slowly drank through the blood they brought that day, now in a beer bottle since it was more familiar and normal to him, “So you can get out of here.”

She gestured to the room, which had become filled with books and art portfolios and printed pages, and even his laptop which he never turned off or let the screen darken on, somewhere among them.

He was writing a new paper. His third since his confinement, the isolation and torment to his mind driving him to never want to stop reading or writing or analysing.

He looked up sharply from the picture he’d been examining, “No!”

“Stone, we’re not going to leave you trapped in here. We want you back out with us, as a librarian.”

“How the hell can I still be a librarian?!” he snapped back, the sudden ferocity making Cassandra jump and Eve shift between them.

Stone didn’t miss the movement and he laughed bitterly, “You’re scared of me. An’ you should be. I ain’t human anymore. I ain’t safe to be around any of you. Specially not loose. Out there. The hell happens when I lose control an’ kill some innocent person on a job, or even you?! Assumin’ I can even leave here at all. How many jobs the clippin’ book send us on that happen only at night? Hm? How many? None! I ain’t a librarian anymore an’ you gotta stop tryin’ to pretend I am! You shoulda just left me in that damn place!”

“Stop it!” Eve yelled, louder than Stone’s desperately broken rant and louder than Cassandra’s barely contained crying, “Stop!”

“No!” Stone growled, his fangs bared.

“Yes!” Eve stood, taller than him and not backing down.

He might fight her, but Eve had to believe he wouldn’t really try to kill her, and he was still not fully healed so Eve knew she would at least be able to protect Cassandra.

If it came to that.

But it wasn’t going to because Jacob Stone was still there and he still had the same self-control he had always had. He just had more stuff to control now.

“Be quiet and listen!” Eve continued when Stone made no move, neither backing down, nor attacking.

“You are still a librarian. Nothing is going to change that. Yes, things have changed, and it’s gonna take a while to figure it all out, but things have changed before, and we worked through it. Together. And that’s what we’re gonna do this time.”

“You’re not alone,” Cassandra added quietly behind him, “We want to help you.”

He shook his head, stepping back and dropping back to sit on the bed, “Why? I could kill any of you if I just lost it for just a second. I ain’t useful enough for it to be worth…”

“It’s not about being useful. It’s about us caring about you,” Cassandra said softly, “And nothing is going to change that.”

“What she said,” Ezekiel affected to be casual as he stepped through the door, “Plus we don’t know about all those silly little poets and painty guys you like so much. I sure as hell don’t want to hafta start learning to tell the difference between Cococo and baroque.”

“Rococo,” Stone corrected automatically and in a very familiar way.

“Whatever. Point is, we need you.”

Stone looked away but Eve could still almost see every emotion he was trying to bury and hide.

“Stone,” she sat down on the desk chair opposite him, “Do you still want to be a librarian?”

“‘Course I want to,” Stone whispered with tears glistening on his eyelashes as he closed his eyes, “It’s all I wan’.”

“Then you need access to the whole library, so we’re going to remove the barrier. We trust you.”

He nodded, “Could you just…just gimme a minute?”

They did.

They gave him twenty.

Cassandra removed the barrier on their way out and they went to go and try to look in the clippings book. See what weird stuff was going on.

They all made an effort to act normal when Stone finally joined them, looking almost like his old self, save for the hints of tiredness and slightly self-conscious unease. It was a bit awkward, but it was progress.

Things were going to work out.

Things were working out.

Sort of.

At least, everyone was pretending they were.

The library seemed to be aware, and really it almost certainly was aware, about Stone’s condition. His personal clippings book gave him jobs that he could do at night, enabling him to still be part of the team, and still be a librarian. But he did it almost entirely alone.

The main clippings book still had weird stuff that came up that needed daytime investigations, or which took the librarians into places or situations where there might be too many people for Stone to handle this soon. He was on edge and jumpy and Eve was almost certain he was suffering from trauma after all he had been through, on top of everything else.

He was being distanced by his curse, growing depressed, and distancing himself more.

But they tried to pretend it was okay, and Eve wasn’t sure why but she didn’t know how to escape that loop of false positivity. They were falling apart, and not for the first time.

When this had happened before, there had been a trigger. Something or some machination of the library or someone brought them back together.

She shouldn’t have waited for it to happen, but she did.

The trigger happened when Stone was up one morning, doing research on an artifact that needed retrieving from Norway. Something to do with salmon, Eve guessed, by the printed etchings on one page of the open book. The other page was a language she didn’t recognise, but presumably was among the several dozen Stone could read.

The moment was calm, almost felt normal. Her, Jenkins and Stone working at the central table, Flynn playing chess with Excalibur on the balcony above…

Then the door opened.

The back door, bringing Cassie and Ezekiel back from their job, and with them a shaft of sunlight. The door remained open longer than it should have, the artifact they had being large, carried between them. It held the door open, let the sunlight fall in the room, and illuminate Stone.

Within a second his exposed skin where the sun hit him ignited, bursting into flame.

Eve grabbed her coat from the stool beside her and flung it over him, shoving him away from the shaft of sunlight. At the same time, Jenkins’ lab coat was thrown over him too, and a few moments later water that Flynn had managed to acquire from somewhere. All while Stone was screaming in pain and Cassandra and Ezekiel were trying to get the artifact inside and shut the doors.

Finally the sunlight vanished, the fire was out, and Stone was left trembling violently, holding his severely burned arms away from his body.

For a moment he stayed there, staring at the injuries that on a human would have be bound to scar and take months to heal. Then in a blur - a literal blur of colour and unfocused shape - he had vanished out into the corridor and probably to his room.

That was the trigger that forced them to accept things weren’t working, and spur them into actively putting everything else on hold to find a fix.

They worked all day and all night, and part way through the following day, each taking breaks for sleep when they couldn’t go any longer.

They went through every magic or scientific or historical manuscript or rumour they could find that might have some solution to the sunlight problem. There was that mineral from the sanctuary, but that wouldn’t last more than a few days, and Cassandra didn’t believe the exact duration could be predicted. It could wear off sooner, without warning.

Layers of clothing and parasols and maybe some super strong sunscreen were also proposed, but nothing seemed viable.

At one point or another, they had each gone to check on Stone, but he had told every one of them that he wanted to be alone.

Except Jenkins, who was still with him when Flynn let out a shout of victory.

“I have it!” he thrust a book into the centre of the table, “Or, part of it.”

They all leaned over to look at the photograph of an old, worn scroll spanning both pages.

Eve raised an eyebrow, “You’re going to have to explain.”

“Well, okay, it’s only part of a solution. But here, this spell can protect those afflicted by a curse from external factors causing the curse to harm them. The external factor is the sun, and so this should stop it from interacting with his whole vampire thing and so the sun won’t harm him. Like a sort of shield. Or something. In theory.”

“That’s an awful lot of doubtful qualifications…”

“So, only part of the spell is here, but maybe we can fill in the gaps based on other spells from the same culture.”

“Okay, but magic needs power, focus and effect,” Cassandra mused, “The effect is the protection, but what’s the focus? I mean, the spell but we’d have to tie it permanently to Stone.”

“And how do we get enough power to do something like that?” Ezekiel added, “I’m guessing if it was easy, loads of vampires would do it.”

“Most vampires don’t have the library so would never have found this spell. Or the part of it…anyway! We translate this, fill in the gaps and work from there.”

“The focus!” Cassandra brightened, “The markings from the monkey king’s staff! They have magic already. That’s how we found Stone in the first place. Maybe we can extend them. Use them to bind the spell to Stone.”

”Guys,” Ezekiel interrupted, “We’re talking like he’s gonna agree to this.”

“It could be a way for him to be able to go in the sun again. He could go on missions with us again…”

“You’re suggesting practically carving a spell into a guy who never trusted magic, and trusts it even less now.”

“We used magic to find him.”

“Which he said he doesn’t think we should’ve done.”

“That wasn’t him!”

“Okay, guys,” Eve cut into their argument, “Ezekiel has a point. There’s no point going further into this until we ask Stone if he’s okay with this.”

“We’re also going to need him to translate the spell…” Flynn pointed out, “I mean, I could given time and maybe a bit of leeway for the occasional noun misplaced…but Stone knows this language. He’s translated texts in it before.”

They fell silent for several minutes, Cassandra finally breaking it quietly, “If we all go ask him together, he might feel pressured.”

“So one of us does it.”

Eve knew it fell on her. She was the guardian, and this was a job for a guardian.

She stood slowly, dreading what this question alone might do. Stone had become something he hated and they were about to offer him a small respite from that curse, using something else he hated.

Knocking on the shut door, she heard Stone’s voice from inside, “You don’t need to be so formal, Baird.”

She took a deep breath and opened the door.

Stone and Jenkins were playing an old Norse game, one she didn’t remember the names or rules of, and the pieces laid out on the leather board meant nothing to her.

The worst of his burns had been bandaged, but the less severe ones were still visible on his arms and neck and one side of his face. Already they were better than when Eve last saw him, probably thanks in part to the beer bottle of blood beside Stone on the table.

It looked like a calm moment. Companionable and pleasant. And she was about to ruin it.

“We have a plan. An idea of how we might be able to protect you from the sun.”

Stone looked up, and now Eve saw what she had feared. Exhaustion and despair barely hidden, Stone’s mask worn threadbare by the months of this curse and the torture that led to it.

“Alright,” he said softly.

“You haven’t even heard what it is.”

“It doesn’t matter. Things can’t stay as they are. I’m a burden to you all and to the library, and…”

“Jake…”

He shook his head and continued over her argument, “An’ if there’s a way to change that, I don’ care what it is. I’ll do it.”

He paused, looking directly back at her, “But if it doesn’t, you gotta stop tryin’ to help me.”

Eve didn’t want to agree to that. Agree to give up, but there was an expression of sadness so deep in Stone’s eyes that she found herself nodding, silently consenting to give up on him if this failed.

Stone didn’t seem happy, merely resigned, as they worked out the spell they needed and how to carry it out. But the work of translating various texts from the same era occupied him enough that Eve saw him look at least contented. Just not happy. And he never really smiled, not properly.

And now, after days of work, and a very painful few hours of Cassandra verbally burning sigils into his skin, extending the markings all down his right arm, they were ready to try.

“You sure about this?” Stone asked, for probably the fifth time, “‘Cus you know, spontaneously burstin’ into flames ain’t that fun.”

It hadn’t been fun for them either.

Sitting out in the open in Shangri-La, two fire blankets within easy reach, Eve feared the psychological consequences if this failed, more than the physical ones.

The night sky was already lightening.

Any second now the sun would breach the horizon and cast its rays onto them.

They didn’t move, barely breathed, as the first sector of the sun was seen, orange and warm, stretching over the mountain but not yet reaching them.

It extended.

The light hit their feet first, and Stone instinctively flinched although his boots protected him there.

Eve watched him.

He didn’t close his eyes.

He watched intently as the sun rose further, tensed as the light touched his exposed forearms.

A wince. The marks now extending down the entire of his right arm glowed red, sizzled, then settled back to black.

The sun rose further, bathing them in light, and no fire.

None of them spoke until long after the sun had fully escaped the horizon. Just in case a sound in that perfect morning would break the spell.

An hour, two hours, and still the fire blankets remained untouched.

Later they would repeat the test, outside of the magic city. Even if it worked, they would still never go out without at least one fire suppression method close at hand. Just in case.

But the spell had worked, at least in this moment, and Eve had felt a warmth far deeper than the sun could ever gift at the sight of Stone smiling, really, genuinely, smiling, as he turned his face to the gentle glow of the early morning light.

#ailesswhumptober2023 #Day 26: Curse #the librarians #jacob stone #cw fire #cw flames #vampire jacob stone #cw blood #cw torture

21 notes · View notes

vexwerewolf · 6 days

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Felicitations, comrade! We had our session 0 for the IGF campaign im running, and one of my players wants to be a moonlighter pirate "infiltrating" Hell's Gate militia. He was initially thinking of being affiliated with the Hell Hounds, which for obvious reasons would present some challenges. Do you have any advice for making this happen, what with the very first mission putting him up against his true boss? I dont know that he'd have enough time to have truly built up camraderie with the rest of the SRT to truly make his character have conflicted loyalties.

I mean, he'd have to have been with the militia a while to build up enough trust to be seriously considered for the SRT.

But moreover, let me tell you what being a Hell Hound is like.

CW: psychological and physical abuse

So one thing I want to make it clear that the Hell Hounds are basically an incel cult without the weird gender-sexual overtones. I imagine there ARE women and enbies who join it but in essence Andros Capella is a creepy weirdo who preys on disaffected, primarily male youth with no prospects and indoctrinates them into his worldview of nihilistic violence.

Andros doesn't really have a philosophy, or at least not one that he could describe in words (and even if he could, he wouldn't), but it could be summed up as "the weak exist solely to create things for the strong to take." You are worthy of having things if you are strong enough to take them, but only so long as you're strong enough to keep them.

The closest political ideology I could ascribe to him would be "stateless fascism." Andros is certainly sadistic, devoid of empathy and believes himself to be supreme, but he's too intellectually lazy to bother engaging in justifying why he's supreme. He makes the most basic of naturalistic arguments (i.e. "this is just the way the world works") but feels it's beneath him to actually justify or provide evidence for his claims.

He hates the minutiae of day-to-day life, and derives no joy from anything that doesn't involve someone else's discomfort or pain. He will steal your food for the sheer thrill of having taken something that you wanted to eat, but he won't enjoy eating it because he despises the physical sensations of chewing and swallowing.

And if you are a Hell Hound who, god forbid, enjoys something, he will bully the shit out of you. He will verbally and physically abuse you until you learn to hate the thing you liked just to make the pain stop.

Lemme tell you what the average night on Fort Cerberus looks like when you're not on a raid: you and a couple hundred other sick fucks lurk around the corridors drinking and gambling but you sure as hell better not actually look like you're having fun because you're all desperately trying to avoid becoming the bossman's next chew toy.

Some poor fuck catches Andros' eye. You're not sure what for, but from the sounds of things he might've been counting his poker winnings too loud. He gets a hand on his shoulder from the big man, who tells him that he's being too selfish - gotta learn to share a bit more, yeah? Now, way Andros sees it, guy's got ten fingernails that he's keeping all to himself, so here's a set of pliers - redistribute.

You jeer along with the rest of the room, loud enough to drown out his screams, because you're so very, very relieved that it isn't you. But you fuck up. You look a little bit too enthusiastic, perhaps, or maybe it's the opposite, maybe you weren't forcing it enough. Either way, the bossman's eyes land on you and your blood turns to ice in your veins.

"You," he says. "C'mere."

The room is dead silent all of a sudden, quiet enough that the pitiful whimpering of the first guy, (currently on his second thumbnail) is the only sound you can hear. You walk over, as a prisoner does to the place of execution.

He takes your hands, inspecting your fingernails, and then your hands, then your arms. "No ink yet? You not pulling your weight? Am I payin' to feed a fuckin' leech?"

You say you're not a leech.

"Those pricks over at the Gate are gettin' too clever. Learning too quick. Gettin' the jump on us too many times. I want someone over there learnin' what they know. You 'avin' no ink makes you a good choice. They'd sniff out any of these boys in a second, they would, but not you. You look soft. Don't he look soft, boys?"

The room jeers at you just as you jeered at the first guy (he's on his ninth nail, now, and his throat is so hoarse he can't make sounds anymore). You try your best to remain composed.

"Normally soft'd be fuckin' worthless. But soft'll let you blend right in with the Gaters."

So, to avoid whatever horrific torture he's currently ideating, you agree. The next time they go out on a raid, they pick a ship full of people who don't know each other and slip you in with the passengers when nobody's looking. You don't go to Hell's Gate directly - you do a couple of hops through the Thousand Habs, just to throw off suspicion.

You sue for residency on the station as a refugee from a failed habitat. They give you your own cabin, and they make sure you're fed and clothed. You smirk to yourself - they really are as soft as Andros said they'd be; they have food and water and clothes and they're just giving them away!

You don't have all that many marketable skills, so after a few rotations scrubbing air filters, you apply to take the militia aptitude test. You try to play it down so they don't get suspicious, but if nothing else you're a damn good pilot, so you get fast-tracked. These fucking idiots just give you a mech! God, it's gonna be so easy to tear them apart from the inside.

They put you in a team. You train together, building up hours in the simulators. Then something weird happens. They... trust you? They want to... spend time with you, outside the simulators. They want to drink with you, play games with you, hear about your life. Well, is it more suspicious if you say no? You have to maintain your cover.

You don't always fit in well. Sometimes you crack jokes that are... a little unpleasant, a little off, a little worrying, and you learn to bite those down because it's bad for your cover. You also have this odd air about you, like you're constantly on guard, like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop (like somebody's gonna make you rip your fingernails out if you're too happy). People figure you must've gone through some trauma and are kind stupid enough not to pry.

You feed information about the militia back to Andros - carefully, so as not to blow your cover. Some members of your team get hurt - nobody dies, but they get hurt. You feel... bad. Why do you feel bad? They're soft, they're weak, they don't mean anything. They're not your real friends. You don't have any friends.

Months pass. Jerry says he wants to tap your team for a long-standing project he's working on. This is your chance. Sabotaging this will prove to Andros that you're strong, that you're not weak, that you're not a leech, that you can pull your weight.

Sure, a bunch of your team will have to die. The only people who've ever put their trust in you, the only people who've ever believed in you. But that's fine, right? They don't mean anything, they're not real people, right? They're idiots for trusting you, right? They deserve it, right?

Right?

... right?

#lancer #lancer rpg #lancerrpg #lancer-rpg #in golden flame #cw: abuse #cw: injury #cw: indoctrination #cw: violence #cw: cults

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